…for whatever that's worth…

Tag Archives: Start up

I’ve been co-working at Walnut Street Labs since December of 2013 and recently stepped up my efforts to support WSL and the start-up community in the Philly ‘burbs. I’m now a volunteer Technology Advisor for the Labs. In this position, I’ll advise start-ups on their technology for free.

I’ve been “working with computers” (as my friends and family call it) for just shy of 20 years. In that time, I’ve done everything from Novell and Windows NT networking to Lotus Notes development and administration, cc:Mail and Exchange and now SharePoint. Recently, I’ve been involved with Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), WordPress, PHP, ASP.NET MVC, Orchard CMS and mobile technologies – Apple, Android and Windows Phone.

If you’re a start-up in the southeastern, PA area and need some help with your technology, want to discuss and white-board some issues, or just want a second set of eyes to look things over, then please feel free to ping me via my scheduling link: http://ohours.org/DMann. I’m available for four fifteen-minute sessions every Thursday morning at WSL:

23 N. Walnut Street

West Chester, PA 19380

During these sessions, we can chat and work through whatever technology topics you would like help with – guidance, planning, etc. When you make your appointment, please describe what you’d like to chat about. If it happens to be a technology with which I’m not familiar, that will allow me to track down someone at WSL that is comfortable with it and able to help.

While these sessions aren’t intended to be debugging or direct coding help, we can delve into those areas if they’re a part of a larger technology or capabilities problem. The sessions will be most valuable for start ups trying to figure out their technology direction, determine which technology will be most advantageous to their product, figure out how to support new technologies, design an architecture, etc.

These sessions are free. While there are no legal NDAs involved, I can assure you that your information will not be shared. I prefer to do business on a handshake and am generally too busy with my own start up ideas to “steal” someone else’s ideas. You’ll find, once you’ve been doing this for a while, that the idea and the technology pieces tend to be the easy parts. My list of product ideas is pushing 50 applications these days; I’m not looking to add any more products to my repertoire. If your start up is too close to something I already have in the works or am planning to move forward with in the near future, I’ll disclose this potential conflict of interest to you up front and we can figure out how to move forward.

David Mann is a founder and director at Aptillon, Inc as well as the Owner and President of Mann Software, a boutique software consultancy located outside Philadelphia, PA. He has been a SharePoint MVP since 2007 and is a part time trainer for Critical Path Training. As a developer, software architect, author and trainer he has focused on Microsoft’s Information Worker and Collaboration stack, working with portal, collaboration, and content management technologies for over 15 years helping businesses to be more productive. Dave presents regularly at major and minor conferences and runs the SharePoint User Group in Philadelphia.